Hacker News: bdamm

New comment by bdamm in "US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons"

bdamm — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:52:07 +0000

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The Shuttle requirements were absolutely modified by DoD's desire to ship military satellites and carry out operations. One of the many tug-o-wars that ended up with such a compromised design.

And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.

New comment by bdamm in "A rough guide for going back to the Moon"

bdamm — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:59:25 +0000

Ah, but humanity is an expansive and consuming force, as is natural since most forces in the universe are entropy increasing ones. And since amino acids have been discovered on asteroids and tardigrades and fungus have been shown to survive space travel, we can't even say that Space provably lacks biological matter. Expanding (back?) into space is our manifest destiny, and good for the price of real estate too since all of earth becomes a luxury destination.

New comment by bdamm in "US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons"

bdamm — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:45:44 +0000

Even space telescopes have been built on the skeletons made for spying, and rockets in almost any form were weapons before they were carrying peaceful missions. That we have Russian, American, and European components communicating together at the ISS is kind of a lovely, if temporary, closure of the circle.

New comment by bdamm in "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"

bdamm — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 07:32:39 +0000

Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.

New comment by bdamm in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"

bdamm — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 02:12:45 +0000

Well, by "computer" we're of course talking about colocated equipment with real capital costs. The data center operators are the equivalent of the people selling shovels to the gold rush prospectors.

New comment by bdamm in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

bdamm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:52:37 +0000

The "hazardous attitudes" study in this report will be gold.

New comment by bdamm in "iPhone Duo"

bdamm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 04:16:45 +0000

Do you have kids?

New comment by bdamm in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

bdamm — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 18:52:00 +0000

Tractor props have the benefit of creating an airstream over the wings which lets you generate lift at lower speeds - this is why leading-edge props are so interesting. Pushers can’t use that bonus feature of the airstream.

New comment by bdamm in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

bdamm — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:19:28 +0000

I'm pretty excited for the hybrid airplane. Use battery charge to get up to altitude. Hybrid power during cruise and top off the battery with the leftover power. Far less power requirements, far less fuel use, better climb performance, and can use the most efficient engine rather than hugely inefficient but power dense turbines. And as a bonus, put the prop power anywhere you want. Designs that distribute props across the leading endge, or right on the leading edge of the rudder, are exciting.

What an age to witness.

New comment by bdamm in "Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived"

bdamm — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:12:06 +0000

This is the true reason for watermarking by LLMs. So they don't get mad LLM disease by digesting their own product.

New comment by bdamm in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

bdamm — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:26:05 +0000

Kind of arrogant no? Linux kernel development mailing lists are producing something immensely valuable with a much clearer impact on economic indicators than your average scientific paper. Comparing them is hard, but it's patently absurd to say there's nothing being produced compared to scientific papers.

New comment by bdamm in "Aging Brains Blend Memories Together Instead of Just Forgetting Them"

bdamm — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:44:07 +0000

Retrocompomorphism

New comment by bdamm in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"

bdamm — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:52:17 +0000

Indeed, it's just that since truth is both stranger than and has caught up with fiction, the grounds from which Laws of Robotics emerged is so much more fertile and more urgent now.

It's absolutely clear that the 3-LoR is never going to apply universally. Asimov also never imagined an AI being independent from a robot per se, nor did he imagine we'd all have an AI portal in our pockets. I'm not sure he imagined the universality of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, either. I'd love to read what he would write knowing about these possiblities now.

New comment by bdamm in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"

bdamm — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:28:39 +0000

Oh how I wish Asimov could be alive to witness today's actual AIs and the cavalier attitude towards his "3 rules". If there is any author doing good work along these lines, actually good writing and not the smoking trash that is 99% of content being published on pulp these days, I'd love to read them.

New comment by bdamm in "Starbase, LA"

bdamm — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:18:34 +0000

Debatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate.

Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.

New comment by bdamm in "WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust"

bdamm — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 19:33:45 +0000

* The NSA has backdoored core routers of the Internet, to gather traffic and metadata. The metadata is not superficial, but since the Internet is no longer decentralized, the useful surface for spying has moved into the applicaiton domains. This is what I mean by "The Internet". * And FISA warrants do allow large-scale spying. * Not only is Facebook explicitly a mass surveillance (and mass influence) device, but there are multiple vectors into it for law enforcement.

New comment by bdamm in "WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust"

bdamm — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:31:17 +0000

Would Ring be considered a mass surveillance apparatus? Accuweather? Facebook? Google? The Internet?

New comment by bdamm in "WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust"

bdamm — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:25:10 +0000

Personally I agree with the desire for more traffic enforcement, even if it means I personally would suffer because frankly I like driving fast. But as a cyclist who also likes riding fast, and a parent to likes giving freedom to children, safer roads would be great.

The problem is that these systems, always and without fail, come with government and police overreach and then the "guilty unless proven innocent" paradigm creeps in, which we have already seen happen with flock. You have police using the technology to spy on their lovers and friends of their wives and husbands, and you have political campaigns finding ways to spy on their opponents, and activists getting special attention from prosecutors, etc. Which always happs, but with totalitarianism is an absolute train wreck for an open, fair, and power-balanced government.

New comment by bdamm in "An elliptic curve of rank ≥ 30"

bdamm — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:20:45 +0000

If this work has an implication for cryptography they might want to be anonymous for any number of reasons.

New comment by bdamm in "How a giant battery is transforming a town centre in Cannington, Ontario"

bdamm — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:26:40 +0000

I always thought the Powerwall was undersized, especially when you compare to the cost and capacity of a fixed-mount generator.